


52 flavors and nothing to lose

by hypotheticalfanfic



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Crossover, Female Protagonist, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-05
Updated: 2012-03-05
Packaged: 2017-11-01 12:48:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/356980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Virginia Potts was born Pippin Galadriel Moonchild Potts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	52 flavors and nothing to lose

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [viva la](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/7135) by gyzym. 



The first thing Pippin Galadriel Moonchild Potts does after landing in the United States is stride confidently over to an ice cream counter. She smiles, puts on her thickest accent and best little-girl impression, and asks to taste “that pink one, there, if it’s all right.” The man smiles at her and gives her a wooden stick that, if she squints, almost looks like a spoon. She nibbles — it tastes like strawberries, and she feels the hives begin to rise. Too late now, in for a penny and all. “May I try the green one, just there?”

By the time the man realizes what she’s doing, she’s sauntering away, holding her black patent traveling case in much the same way that she’ll someday hold a metal suit in a metal box, fifty-two flavors seared into her memory.

—-

Pippin Galadriel Moonchild Potts hates school, but knows better than to say or show it. After War and a room full of lights and the sharp glimmering beauty of that sword, she knows better than she used to how, exactly, to make people think exactly what she wants them to think, especially about her. Pippin Galadriel Moonchild Potts gets stellar marks, especially in languages and mathematics, and if her reports often include ever-so-slight notes of concern (“Pepper seems uninterested in making friends, preferring to work ahead or read on her own,” “Pepper gets along well with the other children but rarely instigates conversation,” “Pepper is content to play alone at recess, although if invited to join a game she tends to accept”), her parents and teachers chalk that up to being the new girl, with an accent, away from everyone she’s ever known.

The truth, of course, is many-layered. Pippin Galadriel Moonchild Potts is watching, and learning, and shedding her accent steadily. She sees that none of her new classmates have faced down the Apocalypse at the side of their childhood friend (who, as Pippin Galadriel Moonchild Potts has learned through extensive reading and research, is probably the Antichrist). She sees that they are perfectly nice, if shallow and naive, and bears them no ill will. She simply has other things to do.

—-

Virginia “Pepper” Potts insists upon her nickname. Virginia (besides being chosen at near-random on her eighteenth birthday) is staid and serious, and Pepper is neither of those things. Hypercompetent, yes. Driven, absolutely. Good at her job, understatement of the year. Careful, precise, circumspect, diplomatic, all true. Serious, though, and staid? No. Traditional, like the connotation with Virginia? No.

But then, no one named Virginia could be expected to be intimately familiar with tarot, or incense, or the battle tactics of anthropomorphized facets of the human experience. No one named Virginia could be expected to have faced down War, heard Death’s voice, or kicked the Antichrist in the shins and groin until he agreed to call her Pepper. After Adam and the Apocalypse, getting everyone in her professional life to call her Pepper is a piece of cake.

—-

Tony is nothing like Adam, except in the ways they’re exactly the same. Tony is brilliant, obviously, and rich, and has issues Adam never did (alcoholism isn’t his only vice, and it’s not even the worst one, even if he swears it’s under control). But there are so many mirrors, there, too: self-importance, for one, and sheer creativity. A desire to force the world to work the “right” way, and then the same horror when they realize they could actually do it. Pushing people away to keep them close, keeping things to themselves because who would believe them, stringing together bits of nothing into tools and machines and toys indistinguishable from magic. 

So when Tony kisses her, really kisses her, it’s not a surprise. And six months later, when they realize in the middle of an argument that they work better as friends (because Tony is many things, many wonderful things, but stable and self-supporting isn’t one of them, and Pepper refuses to carry him in every aspect of his life, so he has to pick one, and Tony’s not an  _idiot_ , he knows the company needs her and he needs her and she needs herself), that’s not a surprise either.

—- 

Pippin Galadriel Moonchild Potts dreams sometimes about England, about her friends and their games, about the witch down the road and that last perfect summer and Adam’s terrier with the funny ear.

Pepper Potts dreams sometimes about a woman with red hair and redder lips, a woman who looks very much like the woman Pepper has grown up to be. Sometimes the woman  _is_  Pepper; sometimes the woman is Natasha, sometimes she has a face that seems familiar but can’t be placed. Regardless of who she looks like, every time, the red woman smiles, white teeth behind red lips, and runs red fingernails over a sword hilt at her hip, and laughs, high and cold and full of danger. 

—-

Pepper Potts can sometimes feel the hilt of a sword in her hand. It doesn’t matter that it was never a real sword (just whatever Adam had ginned up out of cardboard and string and his own odd powers, and if sometimes Tony makes things that feel the same way, she pretends not to notice). It doesn’t matter that she only held it once, ages ago, during a battle she, most of the time, only half-remembers. In times of stress, of anger, of the cool still calm she wraps herself in when she and Tony and the world need it, her right hand tightens imperceptibly around nothing, the half-conscious grip of someone who is just checking, just making sure.

In all her names and all her homes and all her guises (fierce little tomboy, clever loner, no-nonsense assistant, all-but-in-name-CEO, actual CEO), she has been fighting war (and War) since she was a small child. half-consciously and with mocked-up weapons; with a chilling red-lipped grin and angry childish eyes, with a cardboard-and-string sword and the world’s most advanced technology.

Doing so in the employ of an arms manufacturer, in the employ of a human weapon, in the employ of a part of the group of mutants and scientists and aliens who fight every day…it’s not as contradictory as one might think. She doesn’t know what happened to the others, but she wouldn’t be surprised if they, too, were fighting their battles again and again, every day, with half-made tools and a deep sureness that this was their job, their purpose, their role.

**Author's Note:**

> [my first crossover, inspired in equal parts by my own reading of Good Omens, a dream, and gyzym’s fantastic Pepper/War fic “[viva la](http://gyzym.tumblr.com/post/18777679497/viva-la-good-omens-avengers-crossover-r).”]


End file.
